“THREATS TO ACADEMIC FREEDOM AT MONTANA STATE COLLEGE” (MSC) This Document, Recreated Below, Is A 1977 Monograph By History Professor Robert G. Dunbar, Montana State College, Which Is Now Montana State University.

Professor Dunbar came to MSC in 1947, and in his 1977 Monograph, recounts the 1949 – 1961 attempts of “Ultra-Conservatives”, and their McCarthy-ite Type “Communist Witch Hunts”, to have him fired from his position at MSC. (

These events overlap the time when Robert Pirsig, was Professor of Literature and Composition at also MSC (1959k-1961, and well describes, the MSC pressures that surely were happening to the Narrator, Phaedrus, of the book “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance”. In his Monograph, Dr Dunbar also recounts his own personal experiences, which are practically the same as those which Mr. Pirsig writes into ZMM, as follows =>

The ZMM scene opens in a Miles City Montana Restaurant. John Sutherland is talking to Sylvia, Chris & and the ZMM Narrator =>

- >"This was a college," I tell them, "where the wife of the president of the United States was actually banned because she was ‘too controversial.’ "

Here Is the Email Record of Mr. Dennis Gary’s Memories, That Fit MSU Professor Dunbar’s MSC Academic Freedom Monograph:

…Mr Gary Presses Me Again: To add (to ZMMQ Site) this (below) most excellent document, pointedly describing the historical “Hyper-Conservative”… “political situation” at MSC … back in the 1950’s. …This is a quite important document, so Mr Gary is entirely correct to urge it (now) be here on ZMMQ!!! … Therefore …. Have a Look: You will see it 8 Inches Below !!! '''

From: Dennis Gary [dennisgary@gmail.com]
Sent: Wednesday March 05, 2014 12:56 AM
To: Henry Gurr

Henry

What about Dunbar's monograph on Academic Freedom? [This is the article that MSU Library Archivist, Dr, Kim Allen Scott, sent us, some time ago, when we asked for more information about Robert Pirsig’s statement in ZMM:]

Quote: "This was a college, I tell them, "where the wife of the president of the United States was actually banned because she was ‘too controversial. " .. "Who?" .. "Eleanor Roosevelt." .]

It would be nice if it appeared as if a typed document on a typewriter, but not necessary if we decide simply to type it in ourselves.

[The Monograph below, sparked this memory from Mr. Gary:]

Dunbar reports broadcasting a talk on Radio Station KBMN, Bozeman's
independent radio station. This station is to be contrasted with [NOT INDEPENDENT] KXLQ (later KXX), an affiliate of NBC and the Z-Bar Net.

At any rate, my high school speech teacher, Ivan Hunt, the best teacher
I had at Gallatin High, also served as the Sunday announcer, disc
jockey, and engineer at KBMN. He got us a 15 minute spot for a radio
program, HAWK HIGHLIGHTS, the news of the week at Gallatin County High
School. He immediately chose me to be the announcer, (anchor man as it
were).

Dennis

…………………………………………………..March 28, 1977

….. THREATS TO ACADEMIC FREEDOM AT MONTANA STATE COLLEGE

 Ultra-conservatives on two occasions threatened my position at Montana

  State College, once during the Joe McCarthy witchhunt and  again during

  the John Birch mania.

      I came to Montana State College  in  September, 1947,  six  months after

 the enunciation   of the   Truman Doctrine. I was opposed to the .assumptions

 on which   it  was   based,   that  the  Soviet  Union   was  an   aggressive,

 expanding nation, determined to conquer the world. I felt that the U.S.S.R.,

 our war-time ally, was misunderstood, that she reacted from a  sense of in-

 security  and  fear,  rather  than  from  a lust for conquest.   Consequently, 

 I favored the viewpoint of Henry A Wallace and voted for him in November,

 1948, instead of for Tom Dewey or Harry Truman in the presidential elections.

       In the fall of 1949 or 1950, I was invited  by  the Bozeman  Rotary Club

 to give a noon luncheon talk concerning a country with whom our national

 relations needed improving. Immediately, the Soviet Union came to mind

 and so I gave a talk entitled, “Facts Forgotten about Russia," in which

 I reviewed the war-time devastation of the U.S.S.R., the loss of life, the

 nation's need for peace, and its fears of another invasion. Members of the

 club in the discussion after the presentation were critical, but President

 R .R. Renne told me that he thought it a good speech, saying things that

 needed to be said.

       May 1951, Joe McCarthy was riding high. I was teaching the History of

                                                                     -2

 Russia course at the time and wished at the close of the course to present

 two views of the contemporary Soviet Union. George F. Kennan had published

 his famous Mr. "X" article in the July, 1947 issue of Foreign Affairs, and

 signed the students to read that.     Since I could not find a statement of the 

 opposing point of view, I decided to use my “Facts Forgotten about Russia”

 essay. Here I made a mistake. Since I had placed copies of the Kennan article

 on reserve in the library, I should have placed copies of my composition along

 with it. Instead, I mimeographed it and distributed copies to the class, includ-

 ing a student who took it to an influential ultra-conservative in Butte.

      President Renne was in the Philippines at the time. Pat Gaines was serving

 as acting president. The individual in Butte, as I remember it, submitted a copy

 to the FBI, which it sent to President Gaines. He in turn sent it to Dean Frank

 B. Cotner, Dean of the Division of Science. Cotner panicked. He called me 

 into his office and gave me to understand that he thought that “Facts Forgotten

 About Russia" with its reference to "the war-lords of Washington" was Soviet

 propaganda, evidence that I was in communication with Joseph Stalin! It was

 a tense moment.  I decided then and there that I needed support among the

 citizenry of Montana. When Carl F. Kraenzel invited me in the summer of 1951

 to accompany him to a [Montana?] Farmers Union picnic in Hill County, I accept-

 ed and made contact with the MFU leadership.

       Years passed.    President Eisenhower  served  his  two terms.  The Soviets

 launched Sputnik, the Cold War, intensified by the Truman Doctrine, continued,

 as  did  the  threat  of  a  nuclear  holocaust.   In  the  midst  of  these

                                                                     -3
 international tensions in the early 1960's the John Birch Society emerged, with 

 one or two chapters in Bozeman. 

      During the fall of 1961, we had a group of live, young intellectuals on campus,

 organized into a club called, “The Organization for the Advancement of Cultural

 Understanding”:      They organized that fall a lecture series entitled, ”Dangers of

 Atomic War”,    or something like that.  The lectures were given in the Student

 Union, each one was taped and broadcast the following week by radio station,

 KBMN : Several scientists  talked from both Montana State University in Missoula

 and  MSC in Bozeman.   The  group  asked  me  to give the concluding lecture on

 "Alternatives to Atomic War.”  I had given two talks that autumn on the United 

 Nations, one to the Rotary Club and  another, at the College of Great Falls, and 

 I chose to talk on cooperation through the United Nations as an alternative to

 atomic conflict.

      The student lounge of the SUB was packed that December evening. I talked,

 relying more than usual upon my manuscript, for the young men had informed

 me that they had invited arch-conservatives, Harvey Griffin and Malcolm Story,

 to attend. They wanted to educate them. I said that when the chips were down

 we must cooperate with the Russians “or mutually destroy ourselves ." When 

 I had finished, a lengthy question-and-answer period followed.  Both Griffin and

 Story were present. They were courteous, at least. Mr. Griffin participated in the

 discussion.

      When, however, the following Monday, KBMN broadcast my speech, Malcolm

 Story asked for equal time.  When the radio station or somebody informed me

 that the station people had agreed to broadcast Story's reply on Wednesday

 evening, I knew the fat was in the fire. I immediately contacted

                                                                     -4
 my lawyer, H. B. Landoe and asked him to listen to Story's rebuttal. I also made

 arrangements for it to be taped.

      In that broadcast, Story insinuated that I was a Communist, that I should be

 fired and that if the university administration didn‘t do it, a vigilante committee

 would. That evening President Renne asked for police protection for both Malcolm

 Story and myself. I was fortunate throughout the crisis to have the unyielding

 support  of  President Renne,   who himself was under attack  for harboring Com-

 munists on the college staff. I was fortunate in another way in this crisis in that

 I had a friend in Mrs. Heinz Spielman, who was periodically writing a column for

 the Bozeman Chronicle. Her husband was a professor in the agricultural economy-

 ics  department; he was a refugee from Austria, a victim of Nazi persecution. He

 had been through this sort of witch hunting before. By publishing a portion of my

 speech in her column, Mrs. Spielman was able to inform the community of the

 exact nature of my remarks.

      Story followed up his attack with a request to the State Board of Education

 that I be fired.    Colleagues on campus wanted me to sue him for slander, but

 Landoe advised against that action. He said that slander cases in Montana were

 hard to win; moreover, he said, a lawsuit would give Story the attention that he

 was seeking.   On President Renne's recommendation,  I talked to  Hal Bolinger,

 chairman of the college's local advisory board. He was supportive, saying only

 that he thought I should have used the word "negotiate" rather than the word

 "cooperate."

      That which was fearful about the situation was the presence of ultra-

 conservative Donald Nutter as governor and chairman of the State

                                                                     -5
 Board of Education. It was well-known that he sympathized with the John Birchers,

 [and] that he refused to proclaim United Nations Day in Montana. When in mid

 January< Story's request came before the state Board, Nutter was reported to have

 said, “Yes,  I know of some forty pink professors in the university system that

 should be fired." I was relieved, for in numbers there was strength. A week later

 the governor was killed in an airplane crash and Governor Tim Babcock did not

 pursue the matter.

      These were not the only threats to academic freedom in my time. In May of

 1858. [ Should read 1958: This is the sole typo in this document.] President

 Renne,  badgered by the extremists,  refused  to  allow  Eleanor  Roosevelt

 to speak on the campus. Harvey Griffin and the ultra-conservatives said that

 she was a Communist. I was in charge of arrangements; [And] instead of her

 speaking on campus, she spoke in the auditorium of the Willson school, and

 I introduced her as “the First Lady of the World."

      When President Renne returned from an assignment in Ethiopia in 1960,

 he refused to allow Leslie Fiedler of Montana. State University in Missoula to

 speak on the campus. The ultra-conservatives said Fiedler was a homosexual

 and a bad influence on students. A few years earlier we had had a gay black

 pacifist on campus for an international conference arranged by Professor

 Nick Helburn. He was Bayard Rustin, later active in the civil-rights movement.

 Renne had come under attack for allowing him on campus and did not want

 to submit himself to the same criticism again.   Local 1005 of the American

 Federation of Teachers, of which I was a member, was his (Fiedler) sponsor.

 Instead of speaking on campus, Fiedler spoke to a full house at the Helburn's

 AFT attacked Renne, the campus supported Renne, and the incident lead to

 the demise of the organization at MSU.

END of Dr Robert Dunbar’s Monograph.

[From The Merrill G. Burlingame Special Collections, Montana State University-Bozeman, which gave permission to be posted on ZMMQ WebSite. ]

NOTICE: This above document => “Threats To Academic Freedom At Montana State College”, is from The Merrill G. Burlingame Special Collections, Montana State University Bozeman. Do Not Duplicate Without Permission.
NOTICE: Additional Duplication of the materials found on this webpage, (and / or entire ZMMQ WebSite) may NOT be done, without additional written permission of the copyright holders.
…If you want to use (or Internet Post) copyrighted materials, you yourself, must FIRST write to get permission. This applies for ANY copyrighted material, irrespective whether on this page or not.

Mr Dennis Gary’s Follow-Up Email’s (Edited & Assembled), Have More Memories => That Fit and Add To Our Understanding of MSU Professor Dunbar’s MSC Academic Freedom Monograph:: We hope you see how “All of this fits” together.!!!

Henry,

In reading over Professor Dunbar's monograph on the threats to academic freedom at MSC, I see that he mentions his attorney, H.B. Landoe. At the on campus meeting in the Montana Hall Annex prefacing his announcement of the off campus relocation of Roosevelt's talk, Dr Dunbar mentioned consulting his attorney, H.B. Landoe.. I could not refrain from telling him after the meeting ended that Landoe's partner, Joseph B. Gary, was my father's cousin.

My stock with Dunbar seemed to shoot up. I know his face lit up and he told me that Joseph B. Gary was actually instrumental in quarterbacking the management of Eleanor Roosevelt's visit and talks in Bozeman!

I googled Joe Gary and found his obituary in which it noted that he later, as a Gallatin County Judge, was instrumental in developing and supporting programs that used diversionary programs for training, counseling convicted felons as a substitute for incarceration. Years ago I read in the San Francisco Chronicle that a decision of Judge Joseph B. Gary had been upheld by the United States Supreme Court!

It is interesting that Dunbar associates himself with the “Federation of Teachers” and the “Farmers Union”. By contrast, the dominant and more conservative organizations at the time were the Montana (and National) Education Association and the Montana (and American) Farm Bureau Federation.

The Department of Education at MSC was headed Dr. Milford Frank and he was bound and determined that all of us young teachers to be would become nice, obedient members of Education Associations, & not blankety blank labor unions.

If you ever get a chance to watch the DVD of Edward R. Morrow's "Harvest of Shame, the Plight of the Migrant Farm Worker in America" ((the original broadcast of which I first saw sitting in Mrs. Elliott's boarding house during my first year teaching in Klamath Falls, Oregon, Thanksgiving weekend, 1960)), you will hear the head of the American Farm Bureau Federation state that it is better for the workers to work for next to nothing than not work at all. Of course, the workers could not afford to buy and eat that food which the rest of us were eating on Thanksgiving Day 1960.

I guess my point is that Dunbar associated with the more liberal organizations.!!!!

As a matter of fact, Dunbar did not retire from MSC until 1974. Whether the last years were more peaceful or not, I can not say.

In case you were wondering about Dunbar's reference in his Monograph to Malcolm Story mentioning the use of a Vigilante Committee to fire Dunbar, here are two links to the Vigilantes of Montana:

http://montanakids.com/cool_stories/ghost_towns/history.htm

http://my.umwestern.edu/Academics/library/libroth/MHD/vigilantes/HTS/MONT5.HTM#reignofterror

And a link to the life of Nelson Story, Malcolm Story's grandfather and a shoot'em-up Vigilante killing in which Nelson participated!

http://www.bozemandailychronicle.com/100/newsmakers/article_89773f86-268b-11e0-aca5-001cc4c002e0.html?mode=story

With this background, one can better understand why Dr. Renne would call for police protection for both Dr. Dunbar and Malcolm Story!!!!

PS. We already have posted a historic picture of the SUB (MSC’s Student Union Building) where Professor Dunbar delivered one of his talks -- although by 1961 it had been enlarged.

PSS, Hope you enjoyed your birthday.

[Sighed] Dennis

Editors note: Yes I did have a very good birthday!!

Editor’s Notes Concerning Our Above WebPage Recreation of Dr Dunbar’s Typed Document. by Henry Gurr ZMMQ Web Master, 8 March 2014.

To recreate the “old timey” font appearance of Dr Dunbar's original typed document, we used an approximate Manual Typewriter Font called Courier New: We did this, by using a peculiar feature of pmWiki, namely adding a single space at beginning of each new line.

To create Dr Dunbar’s signature block you see above, we used a photo editor “IrfanView”, which is a highly recommended, and free internet down load from => IrfanView.com. This is similar to Adobe Photo Shop.
…In creating the Signature Block above => We found that => IrfanView’s > Options > Capture/Screen Shot > Custom rectangle/region capture, is “just the ticket”, to make this signature block, from the Original Digital.pdf Document received by us, which was courtesy of Mr. Kim Allen Scott, Montana State University Library Archive Director.

Although the pmWiki WebPage Presentation Software, has it’s limitations, & introduces some deviations, we have tried our best to recreate the “old timey” appearance of Dr Dunbar's original typed document. These include => Short line length, double line spacing, same text location of a new page, with the showing page -#, at upper right, as per Dr Dunbar’s original Monograph. However, to achieve reasonable appearance, we had to use many more hyphenated line endings, and different text locations, for the carriage returns.

Finally, you will notice, at the top of Dr Dunbar’s page 2, a single blank space under the -2- : However you will see NO space under the page #, at top of respectively pages 3, 4, & 5, of our recreated Dunbar document: Due to technical problems beyond our control, we must eliminate the single space (as shown in Dr Dunbar's original typing) just under the page #, because otherwise there would be non “Courier New” Font, on the line that follows. I don’t expect we ever will find a fix, for this …. . :-((

Permission to post the above two Professor Dunbar items: “THREATS TO ACADEMIC FREEDOM AT MONTANA STATE COLLEGE” and “List of Robert G. Dunbar Papers”, found originally in the Burlingame Special Collections at Montana State University-Bozeman, was granted by Dr. Kim Allen Scott, Professor & University Archivist, Montana State University, Bozeman, (406) 994-5297, in e-mails to me dated [<yet to be found].
…Many “Thank You's” go to Dr. Scott, and his assistant Heather Hultman, for their prompt, patient, and expert assistance, with our numerous questions & requests re the articles your see posted here.

NOTICE: Additional Duplication of the materials found on this webpage, (and / or entire ZMMQ WebSite) may NOT be done, without additional written permission of the copyright holders. If you want to use (or Internet Post) copyrighted materials, you yourself, must FIRST write to get permission. This applies for ANY copyrighted material, irrespective whether on this page or not.

We Are Saddened To Report That Robert Dennis Gary Passed Away In Jan 9, 2020, Likely From Covid19. You May Read About His Life => A Robert Dennis Gary Memorial Tribute Page & Autobiography : ALSO PLEASE SEND EMAIL To HenryG__USCA.edu With Your Memories Of Dennis. Click Here.

Additional Links To Our ZMM Book Research Findings Concerning Montana State University's Relation To ZMM Book: (For Other Topics, please consult the Main Menu at left:)

• To read Robert Pirsig’s “Montana Radicals Story”, go to ZMM Page 104
  • ’‘The Mrs Professor Sarah Vinke Of My Student Days’‘
  • Dennis Gary’s: ‘‘Following My Mentor => Prof Sarah Vinke’‘
  • Dennis Gary’s ‘‘Following My Values: School & Career’‘
  • Dennis Gary’s ‘‘Memories of His Professor Dunbar & How Dunbar’s sponsorship of Eleanor Roosevelt’s Talk Campus (in Pirsig’s words) “.. was banned because she was ‘too controversial.’ “ The ban was by MSC by MSC President Renne, fearing Montana “ultra conservatives”, in Dunbar’s words.
  • D Gary’s Prof Dunbar & MSC “Radicals” “CommeWitchHunt”McCarthy Era
  • Memories of MSC Faculty Mountain Trip To Deer Creek ~1959 (Likely Including Dr Dunbar.)
  • 1947-60: Photos of MSC Faculty & Sarah Vinke (Vinki Vinche Finche Finch) Including a Robert Dunbar Portrait Photo. He also appears in the group picture which includes Sarah. He is on the far left (appropriately enough) of the front row.

Historical Research At Montana State University Re ZMM

Written by Dennis Gary with Editing by Henry S Gurr 4 March 2014. RevHSG31Oct23.
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